The CMO Needs to Step Out

In today’s PodStorm episode, let’s go deep on how to market with a powerful point of view. POVs can be viewed as a mechanism for distinguishing your brand and most importantly, to design and dominate your market category. As wacky as it might sound, downturns can be very powerful times to do exactly that.

To discuss this in more detail, we invited Elie Kanaan. He is one of the most talented CMOS and category designers, who now works as the Head of Marketing for Ogury Europe.

One Big Challenge

Eli believes marketing a provocative POV is one of the biggest challenges any leader faces.  Aside from marketing a POV, you must also know how to turn that POV into results. He says that a powerful POV starts with the CEO and CMOs should be fully supportive of it. 

“I believe there are three different journeys that need to happen within the company that is led by the standard CEO, CMO. First, there’s a product transformation journey. Then, there’s a marketing transformation journey and there is a sales transformation journey. So for that, the CEO and the CMO needs to get on board, the Chief Product Officer, the Chief Technology Officer, and the Chief Revenue Officer. So those would be secondary, but equally important when it comes to execution.”  – Elie Kanaan

Bringing Everyone Onboard

In presenting a POV, you need to do remember that everyone must believe and understand, your idea with bring good money to the company. Once this is defined, everybody on the board sees the light aka your powerful POV. 

Aside from this, a POV becomes a strategy for the whole company and not some mere marketing message or tactic that you employ for a limited time period. A POV is a fixed lens where a company looks into a problem. 

“When we declare a point of view, and we’re evangelizing a problem, that’s something that doesn’t really change. That’s it. That’s a vision, right? This distinction between a point of view that really points to a true north North, ‘what’s the mission’ or on ‘what’s the problem we’re solving?’ ‘Why should customers care’ ‘Why is this thing a new opportunity’ ‘Why is this thing, a new way of thinking about something that’s gonna make a difference for customers?’ As opposed to a message called, ‘hey, this month only buy one, get one free, right?’ That’s a message.” – Christopher Lochhead

Different Is Non-Negotiable

The next thing to do is: you have to convince everyone that your idea is different. Unique is different and hard to copy, but oftentimes, leaders confuse being different to what Eli and Christopher call as a “better drop.”

“Our minds have been molded into having a better conversation all the time because of alI the shitty marketing that happened before. I mean, there’s some good marketing that happened, but a lot of the marketing is better. This is one of the biggest pitfalls in creating the category — either on the marketing side or the product or the sales side. The Product Team wants to do better products, the Sales want to sell better features, Marketing have better value propositions. /you know, we always set it together actually, is that better is negotiable. Different isn’t.”  – Elie Kanaan

To learn more about how to market a powerful and provocative point of view, download and listen to this episode.

Bio:

Elie, is an engineering mind coupled with a passion for human psychology. His life, career and interests have been a direct consequence of these two attributes.

After graduating from Stanford University with a Master in Computer Sciences, he started his career as a developer at Oracle, when Oracle was a small company.

Quickly he realized that his calling was in creating and building market categories, mostly with category kings: Client/Server Database (Oracle/Sybase), Business Technology Optimisation (Mercury), Business Intelligence (Business Objects), Enterprise Resource Planning (SAP), and Virtualization (VMware).

Elie is now working as a CMO for Ogury, helping them design their category and dominate it.

On a more personal level, Elie was born in Ivory Coast in Africa, grew up in Lebanon, studied and worked in California, married with an Ukrainian woman, lived in Belgium, and now living in Paris, with the loves of his life, his wife Vlada and their three sons, Ezekiel, Eyal, and Eliya.

Elie is a philosopher at heart. He has a deep and meaningful quote or story for every situation drawn from his multi-cultural background and household.

Links:

Linkedin – Elie Kanaan

Ogury

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Lochhead on Marketing™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and subscribe on iTunes! You may also subscribe to his newsletter, The Difference, for some amazing content